


a qualitative analysis of the method of reconstruction

by nirav



Series: shadowboxing with giants [4]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-06-05
Packaged: 2019-05-13 11:12:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14747739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirav/pseuds/nirav
Summary: or: recovery comes in fits and starts





	1. Chapter 1

_i know that you don't understand_   
_cos you don't believe what you don't see_   
_when you watch me throwing punches at the devil_   
_it just looks like i'm fighting with me_

* * *

 

Six years, two months, and three weeks after Reign was fully and finally excavated from her head, Sam flies to Massachusetts and drops her daughter off at college.  Six years, two months, three weeks, and three days after Reign, she walks back into the too-big house, the one that had just recently been filled with three people, with Ruby and Alex still arguing over Mario Kart, with Alex’s latest attempt at cooking whatever recipe Ruby had found online, with all of them debating over whose turn it was for movie night, and all that’s left is Ruby’s empty room and Alex, waiting for her with dinner and a bottle of whiskey and an encouraging smile like always, pretending she doesn’t miss Ruby just as much.

Six years, two months, three weeks, and six days after Reign, Sam has her first violent panic attack in four and a half years.

 

* * *

 

Alex wakes up to an empty bed and the sound of labored breathing coming from the bathroom.  She prods at the half-closed door, squinting in the overly bright lights, and snaps awake fully because Sam is pressed into a corner on the floor, knees to her chest and hands too-tight around her knees, sucking in deep gulping breaths of air.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Alex says, dropping down to her knees at Sam’s side, hands on her own knees and fully visible, an old habit of the first years after Reign.  She pulls in a slow breath of her own, willing her heartbeat to stay steady, her hands calm, voice level. “It’s okay, babe, just breathe, okay? You’re okay.”

She keeps talking, slow and calm, hands loose in her lap as she waits for the tension in Sam’s hands to give.  “You’re okay,” she says softly. “Can I--”

Sam shakes her head, too fast, too hard, pushing even further back into the corner, and Alex yanks her hands back.  

“Okay,” she hurries out.  “Okay. No touching yet.” She unfolds her feet out from under her, moving slowly, settling against the wall at Sam’s side with six inches between them.  “I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

She stays, the numbness in her feet fading and prickling, Sam’s breaths eventually going from heaving to gasping to shallow.  

“I’m sorry.”  It comes out more like a croak, an uncomfortable rasp scraping against the clean lines of tile in the bathroom.  

“It’s okay,” Alex says softly.  “Are you-- can I--”

Sam doesn’t say anything for a long moment, before finally breaking one hand free from the grip on her shin and reaching for Alex’s.  Her wrist and knuckles crack under the movement, echoing against the hard surfaces, and Alex’s stomach twists as she waits for Sam’s fingers to wind with hers.  

“Do you want to get up?”

“Yeah,” Sam mumbles.  She stretches her legs out with a wince, and Alex bites down on the inside of her cheek at the deep red marks on Sam’s shins, sure to bruise even her Kryptonian body.  She pushes up to her feet with a wince and pulls Alex up with her, chin down and jaw tight, avoiding Alex’s eyes as best she can.

“Can I get you anything?”

“I’m okay,” Sam says.  “I’m sorry I woke you up.”

Alex leans against the wall, hands fitting softly over Sam’s hips, grounding and familiar like always.  “Do you want to talk about it?” She ducks down to try and catch Sam’s eye, unrooting one hand to push Sam’s hair back.  “That hasn’t happened in--”

“Four years, six months, three weeks,” Sam says, still avoiding Alex’s eyes.

“A while, I was going to say,” Alex says with a shrug and a smile.  “But yeah. That. And it hasn’t been that bad since you left the DEO.”

“I know.”  Sam pulls free and pivots to the sink, turning on the water and splashing some onto her face.  

“What happened that triggered you at--”  Alex cranes her neck around to squint back into the bedroom and the clock on her bedside table.  “4:56 in the morning?”

“It’s Thursday.”  Sam presses a towel to her face, her answer muffled into the fabric.  “Garbage day.”

“Right,” Alex says, rubbing at her eyes.  “I didn’t know that still--”

“It doesn’t always,” Sam says.  “I’m sorry--”

“Stop apologizing,” Alex says sharply.  “Babe, come on, we’ve done this before. You don’t apologize for this.”  She pulls the towel from Sam’s hands and hangs it on one of the hooks on the back of the door, free hand curling easily around Sam’s wrist.  “Now come on. We can still get, like, at least an hour of sleep.”

“You have the gym--”

“I’ll go during lunch,” Alex says with a tug.  “Now come on. Back to bed.”

“Bossy,” Sam mumbles, even as her eyes start to slip shut and she yawns.  

Alex pushes gently at her shoulder with a scoff, dropping her back down onto the bed, curls around Sam’s back and pulls the blankets back over them and pauses to press a kiss to Sam’s shoulder.

“Go to sleep,” she mumbles into Sam’s back, already halfway to sleep herself.

Sam doesn’t sleep, instead clenching her jaw and focusing on Alex’s heartbeat, searching still for Ruby’s down the hall to calm herself.  

 

* * *

 

A week passes like normal, and then a car door slams unexpectedly in the empty silence of the L Corp garage late at night, two floors away from where Sam's nearly reached her car.  Sam slams back into the wall behind her car, fingertips digging into the concrete, lungs closing in on themselves and limbs shaking with the effort to hold in the adrenaline, the fight, the overpowering strength in her muscles ready to fight something that isn’t there anymore.  

She sucks in the deepest breath she can and holds it in her chest, holding harder onto the wall and listening for a familiar heartbeat, a regular cadence to measure her breaths again, the calming comfort of Ruby’s heartbeat that she’s held onto since Reign.

Ruby is three thousand miles away, though, and not even Alex’s steady pulse is enough, the quiet rhythm just barely different from Ruby’s.  By the time she’s found her calm and pulled her hands free, there are two holes the size of basketballs dug into the concrete of the wall behind her and her clothes are covered in concrete dust.

 

* * *

 

Sam goes to pick Alex up from the DEO after an op ran late and walks into a melee of angry agents yelling at each other and Kara watching from a balcony with a disgruntled look on her face.

“What’s going on down there?” Sam leans against the railing, mirroring Kara’s posture and peering down at where Alex is yanking two agents apart.

“Some new guy screwed up,” Kara says with a sigh.  “Got all cranky when his CO yelled at him, and they started yelling at each other, and now they’re, y’know.  Being boys.”

“Charming,” Sam mutters. “Think it’ll take long?  We have dinner reservations.”

“They’ve been going at it for about ten minutes, so probably not.”  She hipchecks Sam gently without looking away from the spectacle in front of them.  “Where are you guys going?”

“Some weird Japanese place,” Sam says with a groan.  “I blame you for this, for the record. Always telling her about new places that she just _has_ to try.  Ruby always went with her and now it’s all on me.”

“Hey, I’m broadening your horizons,” Kara says indignantly.  “It’s not my fault you’re a coward about food.”

“I’m not a coward, I just prefer home and sweatpants after spending the last five hours on the phone with assholes from Germany,” Sam grumbles.  She props her chin in her hand and waits until she can catch Alex’s eye and wave.

Alex’s focus is still up on Sam and Kara when a fist barrels towards her face, and Sam vaults over the railing and lands just as the right hook glances off Alex’s jaw.  She grabs the agent’s shoulder and flings him away, his body slamming into a concrete pillar with the unmistakable crunch of ribs breaking, and Sam has him pinned to the wall with one hand tight around his throat before even Kara can move, other fist cocked back and ready to punch through his chest.

“Hey!” Kara’s arms wrap around her in a bear hug, yanking back and prying her grip free.  “Let him go!”

“Sam!” That’s Alex-- calm, safety, _home--_ cutting through the fog of adrenaline and fury that has Sam fighting against Kara’s hold and the inhibitors shackling her strength. “Sam, calm down!”  Familiar hands press against her cheeks, the pattern of Alex’s pulse echoing faintly, and Sam pulls in a sharp breath and reaches for the anchor of Ruby’s heartbeat to hold onto.  

Instead, all she has is the groaning agent on the floor in front of her and Alex’s too-fast pulse, Kara’s worry, a dozen guns point at her, her own shaking muscles and clenched fists and panic clawing at the empty spaces that used to house Reign’s violence.  

“I can’t,” she manages to get out, eyes wide and body shaking in Kara’s arms.  “Alex, you need to--”

“No, you don’t need--” Alex says sharply, hands pressing too hard to her cheeks, eyes hard and bright.  

“Do it,” Sam grinds out, and Alex pauses, nods, glances to J’onn.  There’s the sharp stab of an needle in her arm and the sedative, laced with Kryptonite, races hot and violent through her bloodstream and drags one scream out of her before she loses consciousness.

 

* * *

 

Sam wakes up in the same DEO cell she lived in for nearly a year.  The nick in the paint on the air vent over the bed hasn’t been fixed yet, a dark slice cutting through the sterile white.  She’d spent a year staring up at it every time she tried to sleep, and blinks up at it now with a groan.

Alex’s heartbeat reaches her before the sound of her voice, slow and measured, a deceptive calm undercut by the tension in her words.

“You’re awake.”

“Yeah,” Sam mutters.  She pushes at her forehead, pressing against the ache ricocheting around her skull, and resists the urge to curl around her nausea.  “Is he--”

“Broken ribs and a concussion,” Alex says carefully.  “Nothing that won’t heal.”

“Shit,” Sam mumbles, pressing the heels of her hands into her eyes.  “I’m so--”

“What’s happening, Sam?” Alex says, sharp and thin, anger underwritten by worry.  Sam pulls in a slow breath and lets it out, measuring her exhale against the unwavering metronome of Alex’s pulse.  “You’ve had a handle on this for years.”

“I can’t.”  Sam pushes herself up to sitting, legs dangling over the bed and hands curled around the edge of the mattress to ground herself.  

“You have to talk to me,” Alex says, and her voice softens, her pulse tripping, and Sam’s fingers rip into the mattress.  “Please, babe, come on. Talk to me.”

“Ruby’s gone,” Sam whispers, not looking up, fingers digging into the mattress and shoulders tightening.  Her knuckles press through the mattress into the edges of the bed frame, and metal gives under her skin with a slow creak.  

“She’s not gone.”  Alex finally moves closer, kneeling down in front of Sam, hands clasped in front of her tightly, straining still towards Sam.  “She’s just at school, she’ll be home for Thanksgiving--”

“I can’t hear her,” Sam says, and her voice cracks finally, the ache in her chest that has nothing to do with the sedative shattering into sharp edges.  “I can’t hear her heartbeat anymore, she’s too far away, I can’t-- I need her to--”

“You listened to her heartbeat to stay in control,” Alex says softly, slowly.   “She was your anchor.”

“I thought I could-- that it had been long enough--” Her words cut off with a sharp hiccup of a sob, and the bed frame cracks under her hands.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry--”

“Hey.”  Alex finally moves, hands out in front of her and moving slowly, like she did when Sam still had panic attacks after every nightmare, every dropped glass, every time someone six blocks away cried or yelled or slammed a door.  Her palms stay up and open until they reach Sam’s wrists, fingers curling around them gently and holding steady over the rapid flutter of her pulse, waiting until her fists unwrap from the bed frame and she pitches forward. The floor cracks under her knees and the impact knocks the air out of Alex’s lungs, but she holds tight anyways, pulling Sam closer and keeping a solid grip around her shoulders.  “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to figure this out.”

She says it, over and over, until Sam almost starts to believe it.

* * *

_do ruins give power or do they give proof_  
_that something meant more than what we lived through?_  



	2. Chapter 2

A week passes, and Sam meets with a DEO counselor every evening after work.  Another, and she meditates with Kara, flies in the middle of the night until she’s ready to collapse, bullies Winn into increasing the emissions from the inhibitors until she’s little more than bowed shoulders and nausea and hands that tremble under the weight of a full cup of coffee.

Alex watches from her side, arguing, cajoling, threatening to call Ruby to come home to get her to eat, to sleep, to leave the house or the DEO.  Sam tries sleeping in the bathtub like she had the first month she was home after Reign, floating submerged with her ears underwater until she can hear little more than the six sound machines in the bathroom and the water surrounding her, but it does nothing against the nightmares she’d thought she was used to, and she punches through the tile on the walls and four of the pipes before waking up one night.  

A month drags by, and Sam wakes from a nightmare at three in the morning to one hand curled softly at the base of Alex’s throat, soft enough not to wake her but thumb positioned to crush her windpipe with barely any pressure at all, a telltale itch in her eyes of heat threatening to spill out and incinerate Alex.

She squeezes her eyes shut and manages to pull her trembling hand free and extract herself from the bed without waking Alex, and doesn’t move from her spot on the floor of the bedroom, laptop on her knees, until just before Alex’s alarm is set to go off.  She shuts down the laptop and sets it on the bedside table, everything in order--resignation drafted and scheduled to arrive in Lena’s inbox in conjunction with an apology, Ruby's tuition prepaid for the next semester, a handwritten note for Alex-- and she kisses Alex’s forehead, soft and lingering and apologetic, leaves her phone and the note on the bedside table beside Alex’s glasses.  Her footsteps drag softly across the floor and her clothes hang loose on her frame as she dresses and forces herself away from their bedroom, from Alex, to the car so she can drive over to Kara’s.

“Hey.”  Kara’s nose wrinkles when she opens the door, ushering Sam inside.  “What are you--”

“I need a favor,” Sam says, plucking habitually at the overactive inhibitors on her wrist.  

“Of course.”  Kara leans against the fridge and plucks at the edges of her cape, her posture pure Kara even in uniform.  “What’s up?”

“I need to leave for a while,” Sam says after a long moment.  “And I need you to make sure Alex doesn’t follow me.”

“What--”

“I need to leave,” Sam says again, arms wrapped around herself.  “I thought I’d dealt with-- with everything here. With Reign, and all of the history, and how to keep a handle on it.  But I hadn’t, I’ve just been leaning on Ruby--”

“Whoa, wait, hold on.” Kara’s forehead wrinkles and her jaw goes tight.  Her spine straightens up, shoulders broadening, her Supergirl posture taking over as her hands settle on her hips.  “You don’t have to leave. You just need time.”

“It’s been years,” Sam says sharply.  “The panic attacks, the nightmares, the triggers, they never went away.  I just had something to hold onto. And soon as Ruby left for school, I started losing control again.  I need to find a way to handle it without her. Without a crutch.”

“You’re allowed to need help,” Kara throws back.  “There’s nothing wrong with it, everyone needs help sometimes.  Lena and Alex can find something to help you. We’re family, that’s what we _do_.”

“I nearly killed a DEO agent.”  Sam shakes her head and shrinks in on herself.  “I destroyed our bathroom. Scared the hell out of Jess by breaking a desk in half during a conference call.  Kara, I have to-- I need to figure this out, and I can’t do it here.”

“You can’t leave,” Kara says softly.  “You promised me you wouldn’t hurt her.”  Her jaw sets sharper, her eyes bright and hard.  “You _promised_ you wouldn’t hurt my sister.”

“I know.”  Sam’s fingers dig into her own skin, ripping through the fabric of her shirt and into the notches of her ribcage, a mirror pattern of bruising pain radiating into her torso, grounding her.  “You know I don’t want to, that I wouldn’t do this if there was anything else.”

“Do you love her?” Kara challenges.

“Of course I do,” Sam says, and her fingernails break skin.  “You know I do.”

“Then don’t do this to her.”  Kara pulls herself up taller, and Sam has always had a few inches on her but she shrinks down regardless, curling in on herself impossibly more, disappearing into the weight of guilt and fear and worry.  “Don’t walk away.”

“I woke up this morning and nearly blasted her out of bed,” Sam snaps, hoarse and cracking.  “She was dead asleep and I could have _killed_ her without even knowing what I was doing.  I can’t stay here, Kara. Not when it could hurt her.  You know she’ll never walk away, so it _has_ to be me.”

“You don’t get to make that choice for everyone,” Kara says, low and angry and so much like Alex that it cuts deeper than Sam wants to admit.  “We are a family and you promised me, Ruby, Lena, promised my _sister_ that you would be here.  You don’t get to give up on that.”

“I’m not giving up!”  Sam’s hand slams onto the countertop, and even with the inhibitors dialed up and her bones shaking under the weight of it, the butcher block splits under her palm.  “I just need to-- I have to figure this out. Somewhere I can’t hurt anyone while I learn to keep control.”

“Use the DEO, then,” Kara snaps.  “We have the technology to keep you--”

“There’s nowhere in a hundred miles where I can’t hear Alex’s heartbeat,” Sam says, slumping down onto a barstool and dropping her head into her hands.  “I leaned on Ruby’s without even realizing it for all these years. I need to know I can do it without leaning on Alex the same way or I’ll never be able to trust myself.”

“Sam,” Kara says softly, name catching in the back of her throat.  “Don’t do this. Please. We’ll figure something out.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers.  “I’m so sorry.” She pushes up to her feet and toys with the inhibitor on her right wrist.  “Please tell everyone I love them.”

“This isn’t fair.”  Kara's hands curl into fists at her sides, her jaw working visibly.  “Why are you making me--”

“Because you know this is the right thing,” Sam says, wiping at her eyes.  “Because you'll always protect Alex over everything else and I need to know--”

Kara’s phone buzzes from inside her suit, and she reaches for it automatically, only for her eyes to go wide when Alex’s picture blinks up at her, and she hits the answer button before Sam can stop her.  

“Hey, have you talked to Sam today?  She left before I got up and her phone’s here and no one's answering  at her office--”

Sam slaps a hand over her mouth, holding in a sob, when Kara’s eyes land on her, flat and hard as she holds the phone out and puts it on speaker.

“She’s here,” Kara says coolly, staring unblinking at Sam.  “You’re on speaker.”

“Hey, when did you get up--”

“Alex,” Sam says, strangled and heavy, and it cuts through Alex’s questions.

“What’s wrong?”

“Alex,” she says again, pressing her hands to her forehead and pulling in a shaking breath.  “I love you.”

“What’s going on?” Alex says sharply.  “Sam, what’s--”

“I love you,” Sam says.  “But I have to leave.”

“What--”

“I have to take some time,” Sam says.  “Away from-- from everyone. I need to--”

“Sam, wait, hold on,” Alex rushes out, and Sam pushes a hand over her mouth again, looking wide-eyed to Kara for help because there's eight miles of space between their house and Kara's apartment but she can't hear anything but Alex's heartbeat, frantic and aching, and her own races to match pace.  Kara doesn’t blink, holding firm against Sam’s shaking shoulders because Sam is her friend but Alex is her sister and Kara would burn the world for her and it's the only thing Sam can count on at this point.

“Baby, I’m so sorry,” Sam says, her voice cracking through the apology.  “I’m so sorry, but I have to--”

“You said you were staying,” Alex says, sharp, angry, frantic.  “You promised me when-- you said that this was it, that we-- you said we were in this together.”

“Alex, please,” Sam forces out.  “I know, and I won’t be gone forever, but I don’t trust myself--”

“Then trust me!”

Sam sucks in a sharp breath and it catches in her chest, expanding painfully, and her hands shake and twist around each other.  

“I’m sorry,” she says again and again and again.

“What about Ruby?” Alex says in a small voice.  “What about me? You’re just going to--”

“I’ll come back,” Sam says, reaching for a full breath and coming up short again.  “I promise, I promise I will. Just not until I can--”

“You don’t get to just give up!”

“I’m not,” Sam whispers.  “I’m not giving up. I’m trying.  But I can’t--if I’m here I’ll never be able to--”

“We’ll find a way,” Alex says.  “We always do. We can--”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, her voice shaking, and she finally meets Kara’s eyes.  “I love you,” she says again and then rips first one inhibitor, then the other, off her wrist.  The morning sunlight pouring in through Kara’s enormous windows fills her muscles immediately and she takes a running leap out the open window, flying straight upwards and then hurtling south, south, south, as fast as she can.  She can hear Kara behind her, chasing her for miles, but without the inhibitors Sam’s always been faster, stronger, _more_ than Supergirl.  She keeps going, keeps flying, until Kara’s fallen behind and hundreds of miles have swallowed up the sounds of Alex’s stuttering heartbeat, the hoarse edge to her voice, the unmistakable crack of her fist breaking through plaster.

_weren't you trying forgiveness and weren't you trying to stay?_  
_weren't you trying to look up and weren't you trying to pray?_  
_didn't you say that? didn't you say that?_


	3. Chapter 3

A week goes by, and not even Winn has been able to track down Sam’s location.  A week, and Alex sinks into and through the anger that had taken over when Sam had disappeared, right through to hurt.  She avoids Ruby’s calls, her texts, the house they’d all lived in together for the last three years; she sleeps on Kara’s couch or in Lena’s guest room and goes to work on autopilot, leaving the room anytime someone brings up Sam at all.

Her phone rings at six in the morning, when she’d normally be at the gym.  She’s given up on checking anxiously every time it makes a noise, hoping for Sam to be calling, to text, email, reach out somehow, and she pulls the pillow over her head to block out the sound.  A minute later, it rings again. Then again. After the fourth time a series of cheerful beeps signify a collection of text messages arriving, followed by another ring. She finally peels the pillow away and fumbles for her phone, squinting at the screen.  Four missed calls and six text messages from Ruby.

Lena knocks on the half-open door to the guest room, still in pajamas, two cups of coffee in her hands.  

“She keeps calling me, too,” she says quietly, making her way into the room and offering coffee to Alex.  “And Kara and Winn and James. She knows something’s wrong. You have to tell her.”

“You do it,” Alex mutters, even as she accepts the coffee gratefully.  

“You know it has to be you,” Lena says, soft and careful, a hand making its way over to Alex’s shoulder.  Alex groans and unlocks her phone, leaning tiredly against Lena’s side. She was the only one who’d taken Sam’s leaving almost as hard as Alex had, burying herself in her work and ignoring anyone who tried to tell her that it wasn’t her fault that Sam didn’t feel free of Reign, even though Lena was the one who discovered how to separate them.  

“What’s wrong?” Ruby says as soon as she answers the phone.  

“Hey, Rubes,” Alex says quietly.  

“No one is calling me back and you guys cancelled our Skype session and even Winn won’t tell me what’s happening--”

“Ruby.”  It comes out like a crack, splintering in the middle, and Alex sucks in a sharp breath.  Lena’s arm curls around her shoulders and she clenches her teeth together, breathes, speaks.  “No one’s hurt.”

“That doesn’t mean nothing’s wrong,” Ruby says, high and shaking.  “Just _tell_ me!”

“Sam, she had to,” Alex starts.  She pauses and takes another slow breath.  “She had to leave for a while.”

“What do you mean, leave?”

“She was having panic attacks again,” Alex says carefully.  “Bad ones.”

“So?  They never went away, it’s not like she hid that--”

“She couldn’t control them anymore,” Alex says.  “It was really bad, Ruby.”

“Is she okay?”  Ruby’s voice drops down to nearly a whisper and she sounds twelve again, small and afraid, and Alex’s fingernails dig into her palm.  

“She’s okay,” Alex says, her chest starting to ache at the stress of keeping her voice level.  “She-- you know how strong she is. She was scared she was going to hurt someone and she needs some time to find a way to control it.  So she left to do that.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don’t know,” Alex whispers.  “I’m sorry, she wouldn’t tell me.  She didn’t want us to come after her so she just-- left.”  She buckles, curling around the ache in her stomach and pulling her knees towards her chest, trying and failing to keep her voice steady as Ruby’s uncertainty veers towards panic.  A dull roar builds in her ears, drowning out even Ruby’s voice, and Lena takes the phone from her with one hand and keeps the other solid and firm on her back, pressing between her shoulder blades and holding as steady as her too-calm voice as she talks Ruby down from leaving school.

Alex skips work and spends the day on Lena’s couch with a bottle of whiskey.  Lena returns from the office in the middle of the afternoon with a fresh bottle and they sit, quietly, with a Sam-sized space between them as they drink.

 

* * *

 

Time drags on and Ruby skips her flight home for Thanksgiving.  Alex flights to the east coast with Lena on the L Corp jet and Kara flies out later to join them, and the four of them eat a too-good room service feast in the hotel suite Lena rents, talking around the empty space where Sam would normally be.  

An email from Sam arrives for her on Thanksgiving day.  Responses from Ruby, from Alex, from all of them go unanswered, and Winn and Lena both lose track of it on a server somewhere in Myanmar.    

 

* * *

 

Christmas, and Ruby comes home for a week.  She sleeps in another of Lena’s guest rooms until noon every day and spends her afternoons at the DEO with Alex, studiously avoiding the empty house that she and Sam had moved into when they first came to National City, the one they’d shared with Alex, as a family, since after Reign.

Another email comes for her, and one for Alex.  They trace it to a library in Chile.

_I love you so much.  I’m sorry I left. I’ll come home as soon as I can._

 

* * *

 

In February, Ruby’s school has a parents’ weekend, a small-scale spectacle designed to remind parents to funnel more money into the school.  Alex flies out alone, brushing off Kara’s protests, and swallows the ache in her throat when Ruby’s anxious eyes catch hers and then slide past, looking for a mother who isn’t there.  

“Hey, kiddo,” Alex says softly, leaning into the way Ruby holds tight around her shoulders and hugs her the way she had when she was twelve and thought her mother was dying, all sharp sad breaths and grasping hands.  “We still haven’t heard from her.”

“She emailed me again,” Ruby mumbles into Alex’s shoulder, chin digging in over her collarbone.  She’s too tall for this, the last half of high school granting her a growth spurt that shot her up well past Alex's height, just barely over Sam’s.  “Couple of weeks ago.”

“What’d she say?” Alex lets go reluctantly as Ruby pulls back.  “Anything useful?”

“Just that she’s sorry,” Ruby says with a sniff.  “She’s going to come back, right?”

“She is,” Alex says firmly.  “She just-- has to deal with some stuff.  You remember what it was like when--”

“I know,” Ruby says over her.  “I remember. I just keep thinking that if I’d--”

“No,” Alex says sharply, hands tightening on Ruby’s wrists.  “We’ve been over this and I know she’s said it in her letters, too.  You going to school did not make her leave. This would have all come out at some point no matter what.  It is _not_ your fault.”

Ruby huffs out a sigh and swipes at her eyes, even though they’re dry.  “I get it, I just--I miss her. After everything I didn’t think I had to miss her anymore.”

“Yeah.”  It creaks and cracks and Alex snaps her mouth shut to keep herself from crying.  “I know what you mean.” She sucks in a deep breath and pushes a smile onto her face.  “Now come on. Show me this fancy dorm we’re paying so much money for.”

 

* * *

 

Spring comes early, early enough that Sam’s birthday falls on a Saturday with clear blue skies and a balmy wind.  A year ago, it had been raining and cold on her birthday and the dinner they’d all organized-- high above the city with a sweeping view out across the ocean from wraparound windows-- had been shrouded in dreary weather but a success nonetheless, lasting far too late and involving too many bottles of scotch to count as even remotely respectable.  

Lena doesn’t leave the office, keeping herself locked away with the blinds down, even going so far as to snap at her assistant and send her home early for suggesting Lena enjoy the beautiful weather.  She doesn’t leave until well past one in the morning, when Alex stalks in with her own red-rimmed eyes and marches her out and all the way home.

 

* * *

 

Lena bursts into Kara’s apartment as soon as the door opens, eyes wide and breath coming heavily.

“What--”

“I found her,” Lena says sharply.  She yanks a tablet out of her purse and shoves it at Kara, rattling off something about satellites and radiation signatures and algorithms, talking faster than even Kara can keep up with.

“Lena!”  Kara pushes the tablet away and grips at Lena’s shoulders, stilling her abruptly.  “What are you talking about?”

“Sam,” Lena breathes out.  “I found her.” She points at the tablet and the map on the screen, a blue asterisk hovering somewhere over the Canadian wilderness.  

“You-- what?”  Kara’s hands fall away, pushing at her glasses and settling at her hips, feet pulling her across the kitchen and then back again.  “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” Lena says, and Kara presses a hand over her chest, pushing against her the suddenly agitated beat of her heart.

“I have to tell Alex--”

“Not yet,” Lena says abruptly.  “I don’t know what she’s doing wherever she is, or how she is.  You cannot get her hopes--”

“Sam is her _partner_ , she deserves to--”

“Kara, please!” Lena says, hands gripping at her wrists uselessly.  “We have to be sure before we tell her.”

“Sure how?”

“We’ll talk to her,” Lena says resolutely.  “Then we get her to talk to Alex, and Ruby. Only then.”

“What are you so worried about?”

“What do you mean?” Lena laughs, dry and unamused.  “What’s there to possibly be worried about?”

“Reign is gone, Lena,” Kara says, soft and quiet, not pulling against Lena’s grip on her arms.  “She’s _gone_.”

“Just because we got rid of Reign doesn’t mean that Sam is okay,” Lena says.  “And clearly she’s not. There’s more to her being okay than just taking Reign out, and she had to leave Ruby, and Alex, and-- and all of us to deal with it.”  Air catches in her throat and her hands tighten around Kara’s wrists, tight enough to bruise a human but drawing nothing but a sad smile from her. “Recovery is a process, and we pushed her too hard.  She treated the symptoms to get back to her life and we let her. She never found a way to move past what happened--”

“It’s not your fault,” Kara says, hands pulling free and settling on Lena’s shoulders again.  She pulls her close, holding firm when Lena curls into her shoulder, sucking in deep gulps of air.  “It’s not your fault.”

* * *

 

_we just want to save you_   
_pull you from those dark nights_   
_we just want to show you there's more to life_

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

_and i can tell by the way you're listening_  
_that you're still expecting to hear_  
_your name being called like a summons to all_  
_who have failed to account for their doubts and their fears_

* * *

 

Kara hovers a mile out from the coordinates Lena had given her, high above the clouds with eyes shut and ears open, listening past the rumble of the wind and the sounds of the frozen forest below.  It takes long seconds before she can find a familiar heartbeat inside the sound of the enormous forest below, calm and slow, so slow. She opens her eyes, breathes deep, and dives, speeding downwards until she lands softly outside a small cabin covered in snow.  Her boots don’t make a sound in the snow and she pauses and waits, listening for any change, but nothing comes.

The door isn’t locked, and she opens it slowly to the single room that makes up the cabin.  There’s a sink and a small refrigerator in one corner, a camp chair and table with stacked boxes of protein bars and a small laptop charging from the only power outlet.  A fireplace takes up the opposite wall and the only other piece of furniture in the room is bed, overfilled with the long limbs and lanky frame of Sam Arias. She’s visibly thinner, arms skimmed down to narrow lines of sinew and muscle and the sharp protrusions of her wrists, familiar worn-down DEO sweatpants too loose around her legs.

Kara sets her backpack on the floor and sits carefully in the camp chair, rubbing at her forehead and staring across the small space to where Sam still sleeps.  Long minutes slide past and she listens to Sam’s heartbeat, slow and solid, an unwavering metronome so unlike the frantic pace her pulse had kept in her months in the DEO, the weeks she’d spent afterwards insisting that one of them stayed at her house every night until she thought she could control herself.  It’s calm now, unwavering, unworried.

Sam wakes slowly, quietly, her heartbeat unchanged even as she blinks owlishly over to where Kara sits.  She pulls herself up to sitting and pushes at her hair sleepily, rubbing at her eyes with one hand and waiting before she speaks.

“I figured I had a few more months before you found me.”

“It was Lena,” Kara says quietly.  

“Of course it was.”

Sam pulls her hair up into a ponytail, movements slow and habitual, and she pushes her feet into the boots at her bedside, stands, stretches.  Her fingertips brush against the ceiling.

“We didn’t tell Alex,” Kara says.  “Or Ruby. Not yet.”

“Why not?”  Sam skirts around Kara to the fridge, recovering an electric kettle from atop it and filling it in the sink.  “Do you want some tea?”

“You’re offering me tea,” Kara says slowly.  

Sam shrugs and heat pours out of her eyes, down into the kettle, the water raising to a boil.  “Suit yourself.”

“Come home, Sam,” Kara says.  “Haven’t you been gone long enough?”

Sam pulls a box of tea out of the cabinets and sorts through the mismatched labels methodically until she finds what she’s looking for.  The water slows from a boil to a simmer and she drops a teabag into the one mug on the shelf, pours water over it, dunks it three times.

“I can’t yet,” she says carefully.  

“It’s been months,” Kara says insistently.  “We need you at home.”

“You actually need me _not_ home,” Sam says, one eyebrow lifting.  She digs a sweater out from the mess of blankets on the bed and tugs it on, leaving her hair tousled.  It combines with the frail lines of her wrists rattling inside the cuffs to make her look younger, childlike, fragile enough for nausea to twist in Kara's stomach.  

“I'm an uncontrollable entity.  It’s not safe for me to be there.”  She curls her hands around the tea mug and tilts her head towards the front door.  “Let’s go for a walk. It gets stuffy in here.”

She doesn’t wait, ambling out the door and into the falling snow, and Kara huffs out a sigh and follows five steps behind her, not hurrying to catch up and instead watching Sam’s measured strides.  They follow a meandering path that dodges snowdrifts and felled tree trunks, coming to an eventual stop on the edge of a ditch that runs out in front of them to the half-frozen bank of the river. Kara folds her arms over her chest and carefully looks ahead instead of at Sam, who takes another sip of her tea and then offers it to Kara.

Kara sighs and accepts, ignoring the amused set to Sam’s jaw when she hums contentedly at the familiar taste of Earl Grey.

“What’re we doing here?”

Sam shrugs and pushes her hands into her pockets.  “I wanted to show you something.”

“What, snow?”

Sam raises an eyebrow at her and sighs, pulls in a deep breath, blows hard enough to scatter a football field’s worth of snow.  It whips around in the air and settles on the other side of the river, exposing frozen ground scarred with ripped up tree trunks and mud-filled gashes and scorch marks.  A charred mound of boulder remnants stands between them and the river, uncovered from the snow, the water routing around the far side.

“It hasn’t been long enough since the last time I lost control,” Sam says quietly.  “I’m getting better, I’m doing the best I can. But I can’t come back. Not yet.”

“You don’t have to do this alone,” Kara says, even as she floats out into the exposed clearing, turning in a slow circle and assessing the damage.  She hovers in the middle and faces Sam, still holding her tea.

“I do, actually,” Sam says.  She pushes off the ground and flies out to meet Kara, mirroring her posture.  Her flying, haphazard and frantic at best before she’d left, is more refined, calmer, closer to Kara’s.  She links her hands behind her back and pulls in a slow breath. “After Reign, when I started working with the therapists at the DEO, when I was first having panic attacks.  They all told me the same thing, said that when I panicked, my brain and body couldn’t tell that I wasn’t in danger.”

“I remember.”  Kara offers the tea mug back to her.  “I had them, too, after the invasion. For months.”

“They told me I needed a way to anchor myself to the present, to remind myself that I was somewhere safe.”  She swallows the last of the tea. “No matter where I was, even buried in that cell in the DEO, I could hear Ruby’s heartbeat.  It was my anchor. Every time I panicked, when it felt like I was going to snap, I could listen for her heartbeat and it kept me there.  Kept me sane.”

“And then she went to school,” Kara says, arms folded loosely over her stomach, shoulders tilting towards Sam.

“And I couldn’t hear her anymore.”  Sam’s voice pulls tight for a moment.  She balances the mug delicately between her fingertips, squinting at it, squeezing without breaking it.  “I thought I’d learned to anchor myself, but I’d only managed to anchor myself to my daughter. And if I hadn’t left, if I had stayed, I would have just anchored myself to Alex.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that.  You’re allowed to need help.”

“There is, actually.”  Sam tosses the cup over to Kara flippantly.  “Because if she’s my anchor point then what happens the next time she’s on a mission and gets hurt?  I know you remember when--”

“You saved a lot of people a lot of pain that day,” Kara says, sharp and pained.  

“I barely kept a handle on things,” Sam counters.  “I saw her get hurt and I snapped. Nearly outed myself to the entire city as Kryptonian.  Nearly subjected Ruby to everything that would have come with it.”

“But you still don’t have to figure this out without us.  You could come home.”

“I can hear Alex’s heartbeat in an 86 mile radius,” Sam says firmly.  “I tested it. There’s nowhere in National City where I won’t hear hers, or Lena’s, or yours.  When I’m about to lose it, I hold onto anything I can, and that will always be someone I love if I’m at home. Out here, it’s just me.  Nothing else to hold onto.”

“So that’s it, then,” Kara says after a long silence.  

“I’m going to come back,” Sam says, quiet and splintered.  “You have to know how much I want to.”

Kara settles back down onto the ground, landing softly and setting the mug at her feet.  Sam floats down to follow suit, kicking the toe of one boot gently against a scorched slash in the ground.  She doesn’t pull back when Kara reaches for her, hands settling on her shoulders, then her elbows, pulling her closer for a hug, standing in a blast clearing of her own making.  Sam doesn’t protest, doesn’t pull back, instead leaning in and holding on, arms tight around the only person on the planet she can’t break.

“You have to talk to Alex,” Kara mumbles into her shoulder.  “You have to.”

“Kara, I--”

“You _left_ her, Sam.”  Kara jerks back, hands back on Sam’s shoulders and holding tight.  “I’m not saying I don’t get it, because you know that I do, but you left.  You walked away, after you made a commitment to stay with her. You and her and Ruby are a family and you left her.”  

“I had to--”

“Do you know how many people have walked out of her life?” Kara says coldly.  “Specifically her dad, and Maggie. And now you. Did you even think about that?”

Sam blinks, slow and uncertain, the resolution written into her jaw wavering for the first time, and she stumbles back a step.  “Maggie was a mutual-- they decided together.”

“It doesn’t matter if they decided together or not,” Kara says.  “She stood there and watched someone she loved walk out of her life.  Less than a year after watching her _father_ choose to leave.  And then you came along and you two were so good together.”  Kara sniffs, her eyes bright, and finally lets go of Sam’s shoulders to swipe at her eyes and pull back, turning away from Sam.  “God, Sam, you made her so happy. And then you left. You weren’t even going to say goodbye.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to,” Sam whispers, arms curling around herself.  “I never would have been able to let her go.”

“Maybe that should tell you something, then!”  Kara’s cape whips around in the cold air when she whirls back to face Sam.  “That you weren’t supposed to throw away everything that you two built--”

“Kara,” Sam says, quiet, careful, her voice wavering.  “Please.”

“You’re running out of favors to ask.” It comes out like a snap into the cold air, cracking   “So maybe tread lightly.”

“It was the only way,” Sam says.  “I didn’t just do this without thinking it through.  I tried so many different ways, you know, you were there.  It wasn’t working. Nothing else was working and I kept latching onto her to stay above water.  I was going to drag her down with me and I couldn’t do that. Not to Alex.”

“You hurt her,” Kara says, unwavering.

“So that I didn’t wind up killing her,” Sam throws back.  She pushes the heels of her hands over her eyes, inhaling deeply and holding the air in her lungs as long as she can.  “How is she?”

“She hasn’t slept in the house for months,” Kara says.  It comes out flat and unconcerned with the way Sam flinches.  “Ruby didn’t come home for Thanksgiving.”

“I know,” Sam mumbles.  

“She doesn’t want to stay in the house when she’s home, either.  Alex has basically been living in Lena’s guest room.”

Sam pulls in another shaking breath at Lena’s name, hands pushing against herself harder.  She squeezes her eyes shut and pulls her focus in, away from Kara and the sound of the river and the forest around them, narrowing to the accelerating rhythm of her pulse.  By the time she opens her eyes, her heartbeat calmer, Kara’s calmed herself as well, jaw still tight but eyes wide and sad as they watch Sam hold herself together.

“I’m not going to make you come home,” Kara says slowly.  “And I’ll make sure you get the time you need. But you’re going to talk to her.  Today.”

“I don’t know if I can--”

“Ask me if I care if you can or not,” Kara snaps.  She pauses, breathes, speaks more calmly. “This isn’t just about you.  You have to talk to her. She needs it.”

“I don’t have a--”

“I brought a hotspot,” Kara says sharply.  “You have a computer. Get on it and Skype her.”  She sets off back towards the cabin, following the half-filled footprints in the snow and not waiting for Sam to pick up the discarded tea mug and follow her.

Inside, Sam shuffles past Kara to trade the mug for a protein bar.  She tosses one to Kara, who frowns at it and takes an experimental bite.

“Oh, this is so depressing,” she mumbles down at the bar.  “Is this all you’ve been eating?”

Sam shrugs, the narrow points of her shoulders pushing against her t-shirt.  “They last forever. I try to get some perishables when I can, but mostly I try to avoid spending too much time in town.”

“You have to take better care of yourself,” Kara says softly.  “There’s no way these are enough for your metabolism. They’re not even close to enough for mine.”

“It’s fine,” Sam says with another shrug, balanced against the thin edge of a smile.  “After Ruby was born I could barely afford baby food. I lived on ramen and oatmeal for almost three years.”

“Sam,” Kara says, plaintive, strained, the wrapper crinkling in her hand.  “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“I’m okay,” Sam says, breaking off another piece of her bar and popping it into her mouth.  “Besides, it would be kind of stupid to complain about the food when I’m the one who decided to exile myself to an abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods, don’t you think?”

Kara sighs and rubs at her forehead, abandoning her attempts at stomaching the protein bar.  “Alex is going to yell at you,” she says frankly. “And she’s going to be way angrier than I am.”  

Sam pulls in a slow breath and doesn’t respond, watching silently as Kara digs through the bag she’d brought to pull out a wireless hotspot.  She sets it up on the table, clearing the boxes off and stacking them neatly on the floor.

“She doesn’t know that you’re here?”

“No,” Kara says, hands faltering for a moment before she carries forward with setting up the hotspot and opening Sam’s laptop.  “Lena came by this morning, said she’d tracked you down. We thought it was better if one of us spoke to you first.”

“God,” Sam mumbles, pushing her hands through her hair and exhaling loudly.  “Lena. How is she?”

“She’s hurt,” Kara says bluntly.  “And lonely. Pretending she’s okay so that she can help Alex and Ruby.”  She grumbles at the computer and resets the wireless connection until Skype cooperates and starts running.  “She thinks we pushed you too hard after Reign and that’s why you left. She thinks it’s her fault.”

“It’s not her fault,” Sam rushes out.  “You have to tell her--”

“You’re going to tell her yourself,” Kara says over her.  She pushes up from the table and her hands fall to her hips, solid and strong, chin high and shoulders square.    “After you talk to Alex. She needs to hear it from you.”

“Kara--”

“No,” Kara says.  “I told you I understand why you needed time, and that I wouldn’t make you come home.  And I’m sticking to that, because you’re my friend and I love you and trust you to know that this is what you need right now.  But something has to give, and that means you have to stop being cut off from all of us. I’ll make sure no one comes to find you, but you have to talk to us.  All of us. Regularly. Until you come home, you’re going to check in with Alex, and Ruby, and Lena, at least weekly. Or I will track you down again and drag you home if I have to.”

Sam sighs and presses a hand over her mouth, eyes shut and shoulder slumped.  “Can you--”

“I’ll make the call,” Kara says softly.  “You can wait outside if you want, but you’re going to hear anyways.”

“I’ve gotten pretty good at not hearing things,” Sam says, smiling briefly.  She takes another protein bar and heads outside, takes a seat on the stairs outside of the front door, breathes.  Her focus narrows down to the protein bar in her hands, the tinny crinkle of the wrapper as she carefully rips it open, the distant rumble of the river curving around the rock formation she’d accidentally displaced months earlier, the crack of branches and crunch of snow under the feet of animals.  It’s enough to carry her past the sound of Kara talking, of Alex’s voice, the words they’re sharing not ten feet away disappearing into the happenings of the forest around her.

The door opens behind her and Kara sits down at her side, pressed shoulder to elbow against her on the small stairs.

“This is going to suck,” Sam mumbles, not looking away from their footprints in the snow.

“Yeah,” Kara says softly.  She wraps an arm around Sam’s shoulders and pulls until she leans into her side, head dropping onto her shoulder.  “But she’ll listen. She’s angry, and she’s hurt, and it might take some time to get through to her, but she’ll listen.  She loves you.”

Sam pulls in a slow breath and lets it out, shaky and uncertain, and wills her pulse to level out.  “Thank you.”

“I miss you,” Kara says presently, head tilting down on top of Sam’s.  “I’ll be glad when you’re home.” She heaves out a sigh. “Also, I’m telling Lena on you about the protein bars.  She’s going to airlift a bunch of food to you probably.”

“You could also not do that,” Sam says, leaning more heavily into her side and smiling anyways.

“Not a chance.”  Kara squeezes her shoulder and pushes up to her feet, hands out to pull Sam up as well.  She hugs Sam tight, chin digging into her shoulder and hands pressing at the sharp edges of her shoulder blades.  “Come home soon.”

“I promise,” Sam mumbles into her shoulder.  She holds just as tight, sinking into the comfort of hugging someone as tight as she can, until Kara finally pulls back and offers her a smile.

“Go,” she says, tilting her head towards the cabin door and the computer inside with Alex waiting on the other side.  “We’ll talk soon.” She hugs Sam again, short and easy, before taking off back into the sky.

Sam cranes her head back, watching the flash of red until it vanishes through the cloud cover, and takes a deep breath before heading inside.  The laptop is up and running on the table, fan working overtime to accommodate Skype, and Sam takes another deep breath, and another, and pushes herself across the room to take a seat and face Alex.


	5. Chapter 5

 

Alex doesn’t see her at first, head bowed over a tablet and fingers tapping rapidly on the edge of the table, the way they do when she’s filled with nervous energy.  Her jaw clenches and unclenches, over and over, focus aimed entirely at the tablet and not on the laptop in front of her, and Sam’s determination wavers with her breath, hand pressing over her mouth because Alex has dark circles under her eyes and a grim set to her jaw and slumped shoulders and it’s all Sam’s fault.

“Alex,” she says finally, and her voice cracks the word in half.  Alex’s head jerks up and she nearly drops the tablet as she shoves it aside and leans towards the laptop with wide eyes and a trembling mouth.

“Oh, God,” Alex breathes out.  Her hand flexes into a fist, knuckles going white against the table.  “You’re not eating enough.”

“I’m okay,” Sam says, one hand digging into her own thigh.  “I promise.”

Alex stares into the monitor, forehead creasing and mouth set in a firm line, eyes moving along the lines of Sam’s cheekbones, her jaw, her eyes.  

“How are you?” Sam asks after a long minute of staring helplessly back at Alex and fisting her hands to stop herself from launching out of the cabin and flying straight home to her.  

“How am I,” Alex echoes drily.  She sits back and pauses, breathes, shakes her head.  “No. You don’t get to ask me that. Not yet.”

Sam closes her eyes and breathes carefully.  “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” Alex says, arms folding over her chest.  “Me too.”

Sam’s teeth grind together and she closes her eyes and counts out the seconds of an inhale, focuses on her own heartbeat and coaxes it to steady.  She opens her eyes to Alex staying at her with naked hurt written across her face, and nausea twists in her stomach because as bad as Kara telling her about it had been, seeing Alex in pain she caused is so much worse.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers again.  “I’m sorry I had to leave, and for how I left.   I was just so scared, I couldn’t--”

“I was scared, too, you know,” Alex says, thin and sharp, but the bite in her voice wears off before she even makes it to the end of the sentence.  “But we could have done this together. I could have helped you.”

“I know.”  Sam smiles in spite of the weight in her chest.  “That’s why I had to leave.” She pulls in another measured breath and pauses, waiting for Alex’s jaw to stop clenching and for her to nod, short and abrupt, giving Sam leave to move forward.  

“I didn’t know until Ruby left how I’d been leaning on her to stop myself from spiraling,” Sam says softly.  “I don’t know if I’ll ever stop having panic attacks, or nightmares about Reign. But I thought that I’d dealt with it, that I was done losing control.  But I was just in a holding pattern, with all of this-- this _guilt_ , this anger, all of this rage at what had happened.  It was just-- it was completely integrated into everything I did and I didn’t even know it because every time it got bad I listened for Ruby’s heartbeat and that got me through it.  I had to find a way to deal with it so I could get away from it.”

On the other side of the Skype connection, Alex shoves up from her seat and paces across to the other side of the room, twice, three times, stopping with her back pressed ramrod straight against the wall.  “So you-- what, found some spiritual guru to help you sort your shit out?”

It comes through the speakers tinny and thin but still weighted, and Sam folds her hands carefully into her lap, staring down at the lines of her intertwined fingers.  She twists them together to keep from reaching for the laptop screen, from reaching for even a simulacra of Alex, because she’s the one who chose to leave and people who leave don’t get to be the ones reaching out for the ones who were left behind.

“I didn’t do anything for a little while,” she says after a moment.  “I was in South America for a few weeks, somewhere in Uruguay. There was a farm, they didn’t speak any English, but-- I did the heavy lifting and they let me have some food.  Then I just bounced around for a while. Wound up in Manitoba for the last few months.”

“Canada,” Alex says flatly.  She doesn’t move, still just about as far from the computer as she can be.  “What exactly are you doing in Canada that you couldn’t do here?”

Sam shrugs, slow, measured, and one side of her mouth tilts up momentarily.  “Staying in an abandoned hunting cabin eighty miles from the nearest person.”  She rubs a thumb over the inside of her other wrist, tracing the invisible line where an inhibitor had once lived, the movement absent and unnoticed until Alex’s eyes jerk down towards it, scrutiny prompting Sam to wind her hands together once more.  “I go into town every now and then for supplies, but mostly I just--stay here. Work on my breathing, on staying calm, on keeping myself anchored. Do a lot of that journaling crap the therapist at the DEO had suggested to come to terms with how what Reign did wasn’t my fault.”

“Journaling.”  Alex’s hands pull into fists at her sides, shoulders pulling up sharp and stiff, her anger pulling her finally closer to the computer.  “You walked out on me, on Ruby, on this family, to go to rural Canada and do exactly what the counselor told you to do _here_?”

“I was dangerous,” Sam says softly.  She pulls her hands away from each other and tuck them under her legs, forcing her breaths to stay steady and her shoulders loose.  “Alex, please--”

“I thought I was done being angry with you,” Alex grinds out.  She’s too close to the computer now, still on her feet, pacing back and forth, only her clenched fists and the steely line of her posture visible.  “Because I just want you to come home. But I’m not done. I’m so angry. You _left_ , Sam!  In the span of a month I went from having a family to come home to every night to just an empty house.  And now you, what, decided it’s time to start Skyping when you’re still gone and you aren’t even smoking peyote with some wise man or any shit like that.  You’re just hanging out in the middle of nowhere doing something you could have done _here_.”

“I almost killed you,” Sam says down towards her knees.  “That’s why I left. Because I woke up that morning and had almost blasted you to pieces.  I didn’t know what it was going to take, or how long, but I couldn’t stay around you because you never would have left my side.”

“Of course I wouldn’t have,” Alex snaps, finally stopping in front of the computer and leaning down, glaring into the monitor.  “Because I love you and you don’t walk out on people you love.”

It hurts, more than Sam wants to admit, even across a continent, and she flinches back in spite of herself.  

“It would have killed you,” she says after a long hesitation.  “Yeah, I spent most of my time doing all of the same therapy exercises.  I also started a forest fire, destroyed an entire building, and rerouted a river because of the number of times I lost control.  I couldn’t learn to control it around you because it was too hard to not listen to _your_ heartbeat the same way I listened to Ruby’s to keep myself calm.  I would have leaned on you too much and it would have probably wound up hurting you, or killing you because using someone else to control my own issues would have just wound up hurting them.  Hurting _you_.  So yeah, I left.  But I’m going to come back, like I said I would.”

“And what, you just want to waltz back in here like nothing happened?”  

“I want to know that I’m not going to hurt you!”

“Yeah, well,” Alex says darkly, slumping down into the chair she’d abandoned.  “Too late for that. You _left_.”

“Alex.”  Sam’s voice shakes, her heartbeat tripping over itself, the first it’s wavered in hours.  “I’m so sorry, I needed to--”

“Stop talking about _need_ ,” Alex throws back at her.  She props her elbows on the desk and stares into the camera for a long moment.  “Do you remember that?”

“It’s not the same,” Sam says.  “Not when need is about not _killing_ you.”

“You weren’t going to--”

“The chances were too high,” Sam yells, loud enough that it cracks off the empty walls surrounding her.  “Better for you to hate me than for you to be _dead_.”  She sucks in a sharp breath, holds, counts, releases, again and again.  

On the other side of the camera, Alex stares unreservedly at her, jaw tight even as her eyes soften for the briefest of moments.  

“When was the last time you had a panic attack?”

It catches Sam off guard, the even and scientific tone to Alex’s voice, and she blinks through her surprise before shaking her head briefly.  

“Two weeks.”  She chances pulling her hands free and pushes her hair back off her neck, gathering it up into a ponytail to occupy her focus as she breathes carefully.  It’s long, too long; she hasn’t gone this long without cutting it in years.

“When was the last time you lost control?”

Sam lets out a slow breath, keeping her attention on tugging the hair tie around her wrist free and putting her hair up neatly.  “Four months.”

“That’s good,” Alex says quietly.  The sharp edges of her shoulders soften, tension leaking out and leaving her slumped against the desk, temple propped on her fist.  “How much longer?”

Sam pulls her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them, curling herself into the chair as best she can.  “A few more months,” she says, soft and hesitant. “I want to be able to go--”

“Six months without losing control,” Alex finishes for her.  “That makes sense. You always did like quantifiable data and even numbers.”  Her eyes shine and Sam’s fingers dig into her shins when Alex wipes at her eyes and sniffs.  “I’m still mad at you. But in two months, you’re coming home, okay? Or I’m coming after you.  I will find you and bring you home.”

“If I’m better--”

“No,” Alex says, too calm and too level to be anything but dangerous.  “No, if you’re gone for this long and still can’t control it, then your time is up and I get to figure it out.  In two months, you’re coming home and if we have to move into a Kryptonite cell in a DEO base in the middle of the desert, then that’s what we’ll do.  But you’re coming back.”

Sam doesn’t say anything for long seconds, staring unabashedly at the circles under Alex’s eyes, the sharp set to her jaw.

“Okay,” she says.  “Okay. Two months.”

“Good.”  Alex nods definitively and scrubs at her face with her hand, slumping into the chair and letting out a loud sigh.  Her hands drop down gracelessly into her lap and she stares down at the laptop and licks at her lips. “I miss you.”  

“I miss you, too,” Sam says, too quietly.  “So much.” Her fingers tap against her shins and she props her chin on her knee, curling closer to the laptop, to Alex, even from thousands of miles away.  She grips tighter to herself to keep from reaching out and trying to touch Alex through the computer.

“And you do need to eat more,” Alex adds.  

“That’s what Kara said,” Sam says with a laugh.  “She said Lena’s going to airlift food to me if I’m not careful.”

The edges of a smile flicker off of Alex’s face.  “You’re going to call Lena, right? She needs you.”

“She’s never--”

“She does,” Alex says.  “She’s working even more than usual.  She threw, like, a trillion dollars towards PTSD research.  The VA doesn’t know why she’s helping them out this much but they’re sure as hell not questioning it, either.”

“It’s not her fault,” Sam says.  “She didn’t do anything wrong--”

“Well, you know that,” Alex says with a shrug.  “And I know that. But I also know that I’ve spent the last eight months trying to go over where I went so wrong that you couldn’t stay.  So I get where she’s coming from.”

“Alex.”  It catches in her throat, cracking and holding, her grip on her legs moving from firm to bruising.  “I’m sorry for how I--”

“I know,” Alex says firmly.  “I’m not at the forgiving part yet, but I’m getting there.  I think I needed to-- to yell at you, I guess. To be angry, with you, before I could get past that.  But Lena needs that, too.”

“I’m not sure I can handle Lena being angry.”

It draws something like a smile from Alex, thin but reaching for her eyes anyways, and the perpetual ache in Sam’s stomach loosens minutely.  

“I don’t think any of us can, to be honest.”  Alex leans her elbows on the table and props her chin in her hand.  One side of her mouth tilts up even more. “Good thing you’re invincible.”  

Air catches in Sam’s chest and she pushes a hand over her mouth, holding in the ache in her throat and the way she wants to cry.  On the other side of the computer, Alex’s smirk fades away, and she glances down at her watch, hands moving to the keyboard.

“What are you--”

“Checking the time on the east coast,” Alex says distractedly, nose wrinkling for a moment, and then Sam’s screen bisects, shoving Alex over to one side to make way for a momentary blank screen and then, suddenly, Ruby.

“I have class in-- oh my God!” Ruby’s phone falls right out of her hand, tumbling facedown onto the sidewalk.

“That was mean,” Sam says, pointing sharply at Alex but smiling in spite of herself as Ruby reappears on the screen.

“Are you back?” Ruby demands, phone too close to her face, free hand wiping rapidly at her eyes.  

“Not yet, baby,” Sam says as gently as she can. “Soon.  A few more months.”

“Where are--”

“She’s in _Canada_ ,” Alex says, rolling her eyes.  “Like a weird snow hermit.”

“I’m not--”

“You totally are,” Ruby says over her.  She sniffs and pulls in a visible breath, and Sam’s hand digs into her own thigh because it’s the first she’s spoken to her daughter in months, the longest she’s gone without seeing her since Reign.  “Are you okay?”

“I’m getting there,” Sam says softly.  “I’m doing a lot better.”

“You should have told me,” Ruby says, sniffing again.  “I didn’t need to go so far for school, I could have--”

“No way,” Sam says, almost drowned out by the _“Absolutely not_ ,” Alex interjects.  “Ruby, I didn’t leave because of you.  You know that. I had to do this because of _me_ , not because of you.”

“Still-”

“No,” Alex and Sam both say, sharp and in tandem, enough to make Ruby smile.

“You know, I actually missed both of you being cranky with me at the same time, I think,” she says.  

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sam says, glancing over to the other side of the screen, to where Alex’s chin is still propped in her hand, smiling quietly at the camera.  She glances back to Ruby with a smile of her own. “Anyways, aren’t you supposed to be going into class right now?”

“Oh, no way,” Ruby says, nose wrinkling exactly like Alex’s does, and Sam’s pulse trips over itself for the first time in weeks.  “I get three absences and I haven’t missed any classes yet and you owe me a _major_ explanation.”  The camera shakes as she plops down onto a bench and glares into the camera, even as she smiles widely.

“I guess I don’t really have a leg to stand on, then, do I?” Sam mumbles.  

“Not even a little bit,” Alex says with a grin.  Sam’s hand unwinds from gripping at her thigh and she sits back in her chair, pulling the laptop closer.

“Okay,” she says with a groan.  “Let’s get to that, then.” She wiggles more comfortably into the rickety chair and pulls her knees up until she can rest her chin on them as Ruby launches into a rapid-fire series of questions.  

 

* * *

 

It’s harder, somehow, with Lena than it was with Alex.  Lena, who she’s known longer than anyone except her daughter, who was the first one to help her, who can silence an entire boardroom full of angry men with one lifted eyebrow, who’s never once stared Sam down the way she does lawyers during negotiations but now, here, hasn’t spoken in the thirty seconds since the video stream opened and is staring steadily, blankly, at Sam.

“How are you?” Sam asks, trying to a smile but wavering for the first time in well over a decade at the corporate intimidation attached to Lena’s name.  She gets nothing in response and bites down on the inside of her cheek. “Alex said you’ve been working a lot.”

“Yes, well,” Lena says, slow and measured and even, not moving an inch save for her hands flexing tighter on her crossed arms.  “I suddenly had a lot more time on my hands, what with my best friend disappearing.”

“Right,” Sam mumbles, flinching back.  “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“What?”

Lena uncrosses her arms and folds them carefully on the desk in front of her, leaning towards the laptop and leveling her flat stare into the camera.  “What, precisely, are you sorry for?” One of her fingers taps silently against the tabletop. “For walking away from your family? Leaving your friends?  Bailing on your job?”

Sam’s hands start to shake and she inhales slowly and closes her eyes and breathes, slow and practiced.  “All of it.”

“I’m sure,” Lena says thinly.

“How are things with the board?” Sam ventures eventually , fingers twisting around one another in her lap.  Across the Skype connection, Lena stays quiet for long moments, jaw working visibly before she lets out a slow breath of her own and leans back in her chair.

“I appointed an interim CFO,” Lena says slowly.  “After you left. One year conditional tenure with the understanding that you’ll be returning to the role at the end of that.”

“Lena,” Sam says, quiet and strained.  “I’m not-- I don’t expect my job back. Not after disappearing on it twice.  The board isn’t going to back you on--”

“I can handle the board,” Lena says with a sharp look, grim and sure.  “I have almost half of their votes in my pocket, the rest are too money-hungry to care about anything besides how much money you’ve made them when you’re around, and all of them like the optics of a predominantly female c-suite for the press.  It’s fine.”

She pauses, swallows, her mouth trembling momentarily.  “Besides, if they tried anything, if they tried to out you for taking a sabbatical after what happened--”

“They don’t know,” Sam says sharply.  “Right? They don’t know that--”

“Car accident,” Lena says with an empty smile.  “Ongoing trauma. Don’t worry. That’s still the public story and it’s just sad enough that they won’t risk trying to push out a single mother who was run over by an eighteen wheeler.”

“I’m not a single parent anymore,” Sam says after a long moment.

“Not anymore, no,” Lena says.  “But you were then, and it still makes for a good story now.”  She turns her focus down towards her phone, thumbs flying across the screen for long seconds of silence.

“Do you need to go?” Sam says eventually.  “I don’t want to keep you--”

Lena all but slams her phone down onto the table, loud enough even over the speakers that Sam flinches.  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Lena says, her voice shaking. “I’m angry at you but I don’t even know how to be angry at you when you look like you’re wasting away and sitting there being apologetic and calm and--”  

She cuts herself off and pushes back from her desk, shoving her way up to her feet and pacing away from the laptop, just like Alex had, arms folded too tight over her chest.

“Lena,” Sam says, careful and wavering.  “I’m sorry for-- for how I left. For the position I put you in.  And because it made you think this was somehow your fault.”

“You should have come to me,” Lena snaps.  “If you were still struggling, you should have--why didn’t you _tell_ me?  I could have tried to-- I could have helped.  So you could stay.”

Sam looks down to where her hands shake in her lap, her chest aching as she works to keep herself calm.  “Did Kara tell you what I said when I left?”

“Of course she did,” Lena says, flapping one hand dismissively.  “Panic attacks, Ruby’s heartbeat, you needed to handle it on your own--”

“Did she tell you that I almost killed Alex that morning?” Sam interjects, and smiles darkly when it shuts Lena up, her teeth clacking together loudly.  

“Do you remember when I was learning how to deal with my powers,” Sam goes on, picking through her words carefully.  “And how Kara was teaching me now to control the-- the heat vision. And how I said it felt, when I was about to use it.  Like a really terrible burning in my eyes.”

“Yes,” Lena says softly.

“The day I left,” Sam says with a small nod.  She slides her hands under her legs and leans on them, pushing herself to calm.  “I had a nightmare, about Reign, about-- about trying to get control over her. I woke up at like three in the morning and Alex was right there, dead asleep, right in front of me.  And I could feel it in my eyes. It was just luck that I woke up without blasting her right there.”

“It’s not your fault,” Lena says, firm and solid even as her breathing wavers.  She unfolds her arms and then crosses them back over her chest again, hands carefully loose around her arms.

“You know, I actually believe that, now?” Sam says with a smile.  “Reign, the Worldkillers, what happened-- I know that wasn’t my fault.  It’s still hard to remember, still terrifying, but I couldn’t have stopped it.”  Her shoulders pull up into a slow shrug, drop back down and take some of the tension in her spine with them.  “But if I’d stayed then, knowing the risks-- everyone who got hurt after that would have been my fault.”

Lena’s hands go tight around her own arms, her shoulders sharp and jaw working visibly.  Long seconds slide by and Sam waits, watching, breath held carefully in her chest, until Lena finally lets out a sigh and drops her head back.

“Your ability to make rational arguments is honestly one of the most irritating things about you, you know.”

Sam lets herself breathe again, slumping back in her chair.  “You realize that’s part of why you hired me, right?”

“Yes, well,” Lena says primly.  “That it makes you good at your job doesn’t make it less irritating.”

“You used to like that about me.”

Lena sniffs and glares at her, but it doesn’t carry the weight it had earlier, leveling instead into something calmer, more resigned, more tired.

“You need to eat more,” she says eventually.

“So I keep hearing,” Sam says.  One legs bounces rapidly under the table.  “But I’m okay. Really. Don’t let Kara tell you--”

“If you think I haven’t already sent food your way, you’re not nearly as smart as I remember,” Lena says with a huff.  “Which also means that you’d better not laser eye one of my drones into oblivion when it shows up. Those are expensive.”

“You’re sending me food,” Sam says slowly.  “Via drone.”

“You’re in the middle of some godforsaken wilderness, Samantha,” Lena says in her most corporate.  “I’m not going to make some poor helicopter crew fly all the way out there when I can just as easily make a drone do it.”  

“Okay,” Sam says, quiet, smiling.  “I promise not to laser eye your drone into oblivion.”

“Good,” Lena says briskly.  “I’m also sending you work. You have catching up to do.”

“Okay,” Sam says again, still quiet, still smiling.  “I miss you.”

“The tax department wants to-- oh,” Lena says, business fading to something softer, and she sniffs, inelegant and uncharacteristic.  “I miss you, too. So you’d better be coming home soon.”

“Two months.  I promise.” Sam pauses, tilts her head towards the door.  “Is that your drone?”

“Can you really-- it’s still thirty miles out.”  Lena pulls her tablet over, frowning down at it.

“No inhibitors,” Sam says, brandishing her wrists for the camera.  “I can narrow it down, block things out if I need to. But out here it’s nice to be able to hear fifty miles away, you know?”

“Right,” Lena says slowly.  “Are you going to want them when you come back?”

“I don’t know yet.”  Sam blows out a long breath.  “Maybe. Since the city’s louder, more people, all of that.  But maybe not.”

“It’s how I found you,” Lena says after a long hesitation.  

“What?”

“Kryptonite.”  Lena smiles thinly and shakes her head.  “It has a unique radiation signature, one that can be tracked anywhere on the planet.”  Her fingers tap on the table rapidly for a moment. “When we were trying to keep Reign at the DEO, until we knew how to trigger the change back to you, we just bombarded her with Kryptonite.”

“It’s been years.”

“It’s still there,” Lena says with a small shrug.  “Trace amounts, maybe in your bloodstream, maybe in your bones.   I didn’t think it would work, to be honest. It was a hail mary, but then it wound up getting a hit up in the middle of absolutely nowhere, where there’s no way there would be any Kryptonite.”  One side of mouth lips up, familiar and smirking. “Imagine how strong you’d be without that.”

“I’d rather not,” Sam groans out.  “That sounds terrible.”

“Yes, I’m sure it is  Tragic.” Lena rolls her eyes.  Her tablet beeps softly, drawing her attention away.  “Incoming delivery,” she deadpans.

Sam peers over the top of the laptop, staring through the walls of the cabin to where a drone is landing in the snow outside, laden down with plastic crates.  “How much--”

“One week’s worth,” Lena says sternly.  “Based on your metabolic requirements from before you left, and then with an extra kick to get some weight back onto you.  Skeletal is not a good look on anyone.” She points sharply at the camera. “If you don’t eat all of it before the next delivery, I’m going to fire you for good.”

Sam smiles in spite of herself, leaning her forehead on one fist.  “You’re the boss, boss.”

“Indeed,” Lena says haughtily.  “So come soon so I can actually _be_ your boss again.”

“I will,” Sam says, and, as she has more and more every time she’s said it since Kara arrived, she means it.

* * *

_and i can tell by the way you're standing_  
_with your eyes filling with tears_  
_that it's habit alone keeps you turning for home_  
_even though your home is right here_

 


	6. Chapter 6

_if it takes two, i'm betting on you_   
_to hold me tight when tides are high_   
_what will you do, i'm waiting on you_   
_to dry these tears you made me cry_

* * *

 

The old DEO base in the middle of the desert is empty and decrepit, just as Alex had promised.  Sam lands softly by the entrance and turns in a slow circle, taking in the miles of empty space surrounding her.  She pulls in a slow breath and tilts one ear towards the underground buildings, listening. 

A single familiar rhythm reaches out to her, through the rickety hum of old air conditioners, and her grip on the small bag full of clothes and notebooks tightens enough that her knuckles creak.  She sucks in a slow breath, desert air burning in her lungs, and pushes the bunker door open so she can follow the sound of Alex’s heartbeat. Two months of video chats, of promises, of counting days against her anxiety, has gotten her to this point and the first echoes of Alex’s heartbeat she’s been able to hear in nearly a year, and she squares her shoulder against her nerves and keeps walking.

She finds Alex in the middle of the building, deep underground, leaning against a set of empty computer consoles that mirror the command center of the DEO base in downtown National City.  Sam stumbles to a stop in the entryway, boots scuffing softly against the concrete floor, because Alex is twenty feet away after a year of distance, in familiar jeans and one of Sam’s old sweaters, the same sharp jawline and soft eyes when her gaze snaps up to find Sam.  Her mouth opens, soundless save for a small croak, and then snaps back shut as she scrambles to stand up straight from the console.

“Hi,” Sam manages to say after a long moment, and a sharp laugh cracks out from Alex’s mouth.

“That’s what you’re going to lead with?   _ Hi _ ?”  Her shoulders square and her head tilts gently towards one side, mouth twitching upwards, warm and familiar and solid and enough of an invitation for Sam’s feet to uproot from the floor.  She’s across the cavernous room in a fraction of second and wrapped around Alex, knocking the breath out of both of them and holding tight enough to lift Alex easily from the floor. One hand buries into her hair and the other curves around her waist and Sam holds tight, as tight as she dares, sinking into the newfound determination to never leave Alex’s side again.

Familiar arms pull tight around her, Alex’s breath skating over her collarbone like it had so many times before, and Sam’s arms shake with restraint and how much tighter she wants to hold on.  “God, I missed you,” she mumbles into Alex’s shoulder, squeezing her eyes shut tight instead of her arms.

“I missed you, too.”  Alex’s voice catches and hitches, the words swallowed up by the sharp inhales of her breaths.  “You big jerk. Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

“Okay,” Sam says, smiling against the side of Alex’s head.  “Okay. I promise.”

Alex pulls back, eventually, still lifted off the floor easily in Sam’s embrace, and her forehead presses against Sam’s for a long series of moments, long enough for Sam’s chest to ache.  Alex’s hands tangle into her hair, holding her in place, and Sam takes in a long breath because this, here, even in the middle of an abandoned government bunker in the desert, is home.

“Are you ready?” Alex asks after a long moment.  She pulls back in Sam’s embrace, enough to level a steady gaze at her, and Sam swallows, hesitates, nods.  They’ve talked through this, this possibility that Sam still can’t be around people, that she’s still dangerous.  

“Yeah,” Sam says.  She sets Alex down gently, pulling her hands back and shoving them into her pockets.  “What’s the plan?”

Alex clears her throat delicately, looking down at her fingers and the way they twist around one another.  She pulls a tablet out of her backpack and turns it to face Sam. The video plays automatically, the last of the Reign events the news was able to record, the one where she ripped through a police battalion with bare hands, crushing chests and snapping necks--

Sam pulls in a deep breath, swallowing against the rising wave of adrenaline reaching out of her chest, the way the strength in her muscles twitches defensively, ready to fight a Reign that isn’t there anymore.  Her hands stay loose, her shoulders gentle, her pulse steady even as the memory of every broken neck and crushed sternum floods back into her. She keeps her focus trained on the video, watching through to the end, and her body stays still until it ends and the memories fade.

Another video starts, a familiar newscast of an alien blowing a gas line in downtown National City, of Alex getting flung like a ragdoll into the side of a building and crumpling.  Sam’s eyes go wide but her control holds firm, her breath steady. 

Another-- a street in disarray, a mess of loose construction equipment, a wrecking ball breaking free and a familiar off-screen scream of fear reaching out of the speakers, Sam curled around her daughter uselessly-- and her fingers twitch, her breath catches, but her pulse stays calm, her shoulders soft.  

Alex sets the tablet down on the console behind her, and Sam lets out a slow breath, blinks, smiles.  She controlled herself through the test, through the memories, through the remnants of Alex and Ruby’s brushes with dying.  She can go home, now, finally, after so long alone. 

“Did I ever tell you about the first time I slept with Maggie?”

Tension snaps into Sam’s shoulders.  “What?” She shakes her head and the tension out of her shoulders carefully.  “We haven’t been in the same room in nearly a year and you want to talk about having sex with your ex-fiance?”

Alex folds her arms over her chest, face carefully neutral, eyes blank.  “The next day, Kara disappeared through a portal to another planet, and I panicked.  When Maggie tried to talk to me about it, I blew up at her, blew her off, walked away.”  Her focus holds sharp on Sam’s creased forehead and the tension in her jaw. “After, when Kara was safe, and I told Maggie what was going on, told her I wanted to be with her--”

An ache burns in Sam’s chest, fingers twitching towards a fist at Alex talking about the woman she’d planned to marry once.

“--and she said I got one.  Another screw up like that and she’d be done.”  One of Alex’s eyebrows lifts, watching as Sam blinks slowly and anger blooms in her chest.

“She said that?” Her voice shakes almost as much as her hands.  “That you get to freak out once and then she’d dump you? Because-- Jesus, Alex,” Sam snaps.  “Why are you--”

“Because you aren’t melting the floor with heat vision or punching through the walls,” Alex says softly, neutrality slipping away and fading into a smile.  

“What?”

“You wanted a test before you came home for good.”  Alex takes a step towards her, and another, and another.  “To know if you were ready.”

“That was--”  Sam stares down at her, blinking slowly, confusion written across her features.  “What?”

“You’re angry,” Alex says.  Her hands curl gently around Sam’s wrists, thumbs following the tense lines of muscles in her forearms up towards her elbows and then back down.  “Aren’t you?”

“Of course I am,” Sam mutters.  “That’s such a shit thing to say to anyone--”

“You’re angry, and you didn’t do anything,” Alex says over her.  “You watched Reign hurt people, you watched me get hurt, Ruby in danger, and you kept control during that, but we both know you would’ve have kept worrying forever about what would happen if something new pissed you off.  And something did. And you kept control.” One side of her mouth quirks up into a smile as Sam works through the explanation in her head.

Tension slides abruptly out of Sam’s body and she drops her head back with a sharp laugh.  “Jesus,” she mumbles, pulling her head back down and dropping against Alex’s, another laugh bubbling out of her.

“I also wanted to tell you that, specifically,” Alex says softly, not pulling back, hands still around Sam’s wrists.  “Because I want you to know that that’s not what’s going to happen here. You left, and it hurt, but you’re my  _ partner.   _ We’re a team.  This isn’t a you-get-one situation.”  Her hands unwrap from Sam’s arms and curl up around the back of her neck, holding her in place and pulling, pulling, pulling until Sam leans in and kisses her for the first time in a year.

Alex stills tastes the same, and Sam’s hands shake until they find purchase at her waist, holding her close.  Her breath wavers, sharing air with Alex, and she smiles, breathes, kisses her again.

“Can we go home?” she mumbles into Alex’s mouth eventually.  “I want to go home.”

“Yeah,” Alex says with a nod, breathless and smiling and a little dazed, like she had been the very first time Sam kissed her, really kissed her, with intent and heat and  _ want _ , on the sidewalk outside of Alex’s old apartment.  “Let’s go home.” Her hands untangle from Sam’s hair and fingers slide together, locking on and holding tight, and they gather the bags into Alex's car and set off towards the National City skyline, Sam's hand locked tight in Alex's over the gearshift.

Their house is sparkling-clean, the lived-in smell replaced with a sanitary, almost clinical, scent from cleaning products.  There’s no stack of half-read science journals on the coffee table or scattered dirty laundry, no leather jacket hanging over the banister.  Sam pulls in a slow breath as she steps inside and turns in a slow circle, eyes shut as Alex shuts the door gently behind them.

“Lena was so ready to have her apartment back that she paid for someone to clean the--”

Sam cuts her off as soon as the door shuts behind them, sweeping Alex up into her arms and speeding up the stairs to their bedroom, Alex’s laugh echoing in her ear and arms winding around her neck familiarly.  The bed is neatly made, the blankets straighter than they ever left them and hospital corners tucked sharply around the mattress, but it’s still  _ home _ and it’s still theirs.

* * *

Alex’s phone chirps from her jacket pocket somewhere on the floor, and she lets out a grumble and doesn’t move from her spot curled against Sam’s side.  Her fingers follow the lines of Sam’s ribs, the protrusions of her hipbones, still sharper than when she’d left even after two months of eating better.

“You need to spend some time at the DEO,” she mumbles, fingertips laddering up Sam’s ribcage, lips pressed against her shoulder.  “Under the sun lamps. It’ll help you get better faster, get you back up to a healthy weight.”

“I’m okay.”  Sam kisses her forehead, head tilting back so Alex can fit neatly under her chin.  Her eyes slide shut at Alex’s fingers still on her skin, moving lazily on a familiar track to follow a faded white line of scar tissue on her ribcage left over from Reign and never losing contact, as if Sam might disappear again if she does.  “I promise.”

“Still,” Alex says.  “Humor me.”

“Okay,” Sam says softly.  “Sun lamps it is.”

Alex’s phone beeps again, and again, and Alex lets out a groan and pushes up to sitting, one hand still resting on Sam’s stomach.  “Who do you think it is, Kara or Lena? Ten bucks says Kara.”

“I’m not taking that bet,” Sam says with a yawn.  She rolls over onto her side and props her head on one hand, watching as Alex nearly falls off the bed trying to drag her jacket over without standing up.

“Totally should have.”  Alex flops back down at her side with a grunt.  “It was Lena. She’s on her way over and says we’d better be decent.”  

“Suppose I deserve that,” Sam mumbles, forehead dropping down to Alex’s shoulder.  Another text beeps through on Alex’s phone, and Sam lets out a loud groan.

“She’s bringing you a new phone,” Alex says with a laugh.  “Sounds like she’s ready to get you back to work.”

“Ugh,” Sam mutters, even though her smile betrays her, ready to see her best friend again in person.  “Think she’ll give me the rest of the week? I want to go--”

“I already bought plane tickets.”  Alex wiggles her shoulder until Sam pulls her head up enough to meet her eyes.  “This weekend, we leave Friday. Which means you have enough time to spend at least three days under the sunlamps at the DEO,” she adds firmly, nose wrinkling.  “You  _ really _ need it.  Did you seriously have to pick somewhere where it was cloudy and snowing all day every day?”

Sam rolls back over onto her back with a sigh and a yawn.  “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” she says with a shrug.  “But okay. Sun lamps all week. Go see Ruby on Friday.”

“Uh huh.”  Alex rolls to hover over her, leaning down to kiss her, slow and easy.  “Hey,” she says eventually, quietly, only barely pulling back.

“Hey,” Sam says, hands following familiar lines of muscle in Alex’s back, up and down, over and over.  

“You’re home.”      

“I am,” Sam says.  She stills her hands at Alex’s hips and holds steady, staring unblinking up at her.  “I love you.”

“God, that sounds so much better not over Skype,” Alex mutters, dropping down to kiss her again.  

“Most things are better not over Skype,” Sam counters, one leg moving to hook around Alex’s so she can flip them over smoothly.  “Case in point.” 

“Yeah, no, Skype wasn’t cutting it at  _ all _ ,” Alex says, her voice lilting up into a whine as Sam’s lips move easy against her skin, and Sam smiles against the side of her neck.  “Lena’s going to be here--”

“She’s already here,” Sam mumbles, pressing a kiss to her sternum.  “I can hear her in the kitchen. She made coffee.” 

“What--”

“So keep quiet.”  Sam pauses, chin resting on her stomach, just long enough to smirk up at her.  “She walked into our house when we hadn’t seen each other in a year. She knew exactly what she was getting into.”  She presses a kiss to Alex’s hip and grins up at her when she shudders and slaps a hand over her mouth. “Shh.”

It’s another half hour before they make their way downstairs, and Alex makes a beeline for the coffee while Sam hovers in the door to the kitchen, arms wrapped around herself.  Lena’s seated at the counter, laptop open in front of her, typing away, and doesn’t look up for long seconds.

“I waited outside literally as long as I could,” she says by way of greeting.  “But I needed to email some files and your wifi doesn’t reach to the driveway, though I wish to God it did.  You’re  _ not _ quiet.”

Alex chokes on her coffee and Sam lets out a laugh, bright and loud, and makes her way across the kitchen to grab Lena into a hug.  

“I missed you,” she mumbles into Lena’s shoulder.  Lena doesn’t respond, instead just holding tight and breathing shakily.  

“I missed you, too,” she says eventually as she pulls back and nitpicks at straightening Sam’s sweater.  “And I know you needed your welcome-home sex, but honestly, couldn’t you have wrapped it up sooner? I’d like to have had some time with you before--”

She’s cut off by Sam suddenly standing up straighter, her forehead creasing as a familiar rhythm reaches past the focus on the immediate proximity of the house she’s had since they arrived.

“Lena,” she says, eyes wide.  “You didn’t.”

“What?” Alex says from the other side of the kitchen, looking between the two of them, and she nearly drops her coffee when Sam speeds out of the kitchen.  The door bangs open behind her and Sam makes it out into the driveway just as Ruby’s launching out of one of Lena’s towncars. Somewhere in the background is Alex, halfheartedly chastising Lena with  _ “You couldn’t have told me about this before I spent a grand on plane tickets?” _ but Sam’s got her arms around Ruby and a familiar pulse hammering over the sound of everything else as she hugs her daughter, because this, here, now, finally, with Alex and Lena bickering in the background, Ruby holding her tight, Kara’s familiar heartbeat creeping in from the backyard where she always stealthily lands as Supergirl, is home.    

* * *

 

_when the rain falls or the river's dry running_   
_you can fall into my arms_   
_and if we're still living when the Earth stops spinning_   
_you can fall into my arms_   
_even if you stay or if you go_   
_oh, i know you know that here is home_   
_yes, i know you know that here is home_


End file.
